Category Archives for Charles Potts

While our attention is distracted by Iraq
Take time to object to some of the other wars
The American empire is fighting concurrently as well, such as
The war in The Philippines, the war in Columbia,
The war in Korea, the war in Afghanistan,
The war in Israel, the war in Pakistan,
The war in Yemen, the war on Terror,
The war on poverty, the war on drugs,
The war on The Bill of Rights,
The war on common sense itself.

The war of America against the world
Can’t be about anything grander than
The president’s pathology and popularity.

Not since King Lear have speakers of English been mislead
By a leader so completely ‘round the bend.
Power is dangerous enough in the hands of ordinary plodders.
In the hands of the crazy and uneducated
The danger expands exponentially.

The last time Congress declared war was 1941.
62 years later the siege mentality still rules.

The 18th century supposition behind the Separation of Powers, ie
Congress shall have the power to declare war;
The president shall be the commander in chief of the armed forces
Presupposed that a declaration of war would precede
Any armed forces to command

Since we devolved to a permanent military
With the president as the commander
We have perpetual war
With Congress towed along like the tail of a kite.

Someday we’ll lift the siege and see
The pitiful men behind the curtains pulling strings.

Consumer Imperialism

1
In 1946 the Truman Administration cobbled together policy
That will guide America and the United States into a grave:
Stimulate domestic consumption and search for foreign markets.

World War Two propelled Americans across the world
Destroying their distinguished isolation
And Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self determination of nations,
Putting Hershey Bars and atom bombs along with GI Joes
Into the world word bank
Along with the great American coinage, OK.

OK can mean anything from yes to you are on your own.
OK, if that’s the way you want it,
OK with me.

It might have been OK if they’d confined domestic consumption to
The simple facts of warm clothes, adequate housing, and nutritious meals,
The need for which food stamp Americans have in common with everybody else.
“One third of the nation is ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed,” FDR declaimed seventy years ago.
It’s still true for radically different reasons one depression later.

In 1946 the American people were hungry to forget
The Great Depression
With its soup lines, dust bowls and railroaded hobos
As the speculated roaring of the twenties simpered out into
The savage thirties whine.

The exact point in the relationship between
Dying early to save the system money and
Working to consume yourself to death efficiently
Hasn’t quite been worked completely out to policy maker’s actuarial satisfaction.

Americans stood 19th century Maytag frugality on its head:
Build it well and make it last,
Darn your socks, grind your wheat, make your own soap,
Do without until you can afford it,
Into a plastic credit card throw away civilization
Destroying the environment on the side as a
Mildly regrettable cost of doing business
Symbolized by the shopping cart in the trough with
Wal-Mart’s predatory criminal labor and retail practices.

2
In the old days prior to 1946, except for Mexico, Louisiana, Oregon and the Indians,
The United States government had confined its actual imperialism
To the Roosevelt Doctrine’s annual obligatory invasion of Latin America

With a few cruel Hawaiian exceptions such as when their empire of ironic slaughter
Was taken to the limit in Aguinaldo’s Philippines
Led by Teddy Roosevelt’s “secret” admiration of the British Empire

Who goaded American into building a navy
Sufficiently enormous eventually to make the basket catch
Of the British Empire’s bases and other falling stock in the Atlantic Charter.

Post 1946 when imperialism became the way of life
Colonial wars piled up in the history books alongside Syngman Rhee’s Korea,
Hoh Chi Minh’s Viet Nam, Salvadore Allende’s Chile,
And Saddam Hussein’s broken Babylon.

Some of the secret history rarely gets recited in public
Like General Eisenhower’s perpetual overthrow by his CIA Army of
Governments in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, The Congo, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“It’s about jobs,” George Bush the 1st gesticulated nervously
When asked to rationalize the Gulf War he’d goaded
The allies into reestablishing the British Empire’s toehold on the oily Emirate of Kuwait.

The United States military has been under siege
Real or imagined,
Sometimes both; never neither,
Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor–
Sixty plus years of the war that never stops.

It’s what these southern kleptocrats desire
Under siege like the Confederates
Where they lost the battles and built the shrines
The basis (es) of their military theocracy preys upon.

Semi-Colon half an asshole Powell used to claim with a straight face that
The exit strategy is the most important aspect of Colonial War.
There is no exit from Consumer Imperialism.

Consumer Imperialism, World War 3.1

World War 3.1 was a knife fight at 20,000 feet.
Have your will up to date.

Never lose sight of the fact that the “faith based initiative”
Which took out the twin towers of the World Trade Center
Was carried out by trainees of the CIA once removed
Unleashing a relentless wave of video military fascism.

Win the war on terrorism by training counter terrorists
To terrorize other people in a war on abstract nouns.
Government by sarcasm is an unfit substitute for self rule.
Help wanted: somebody to shovel the horseshit off the information superhighway.
.
With each side referring to the other side as evil
It makes one wonder if both sides are right.
Evil is that which has power over you.
God doesn’t take sides; that’s what makes God God.
Human beings have no faith in their own story,
So they drag in God as the author of
Their Christian and Moslem shenanigans.

Flying hijacked commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon
Was a reckless act of freedom
Rather than an attack on it or democracy as claimed by the unelected
President Bush who obtained office by judicial fraud,
Hardly an unimpeachable spokesman for Democracy.

There was no attack on
The Samuel J. Tilden New York Public Library or
The Statue of Liberty.That would have been an attack on Freedom and Democracy.

The world trade towers were a symbol all right:
A symbol of the Rockefeller brothers’ capacity
To manipulate the public policy of the
New York and New Jersey Port Authorities into
Rescuing some of their down in the mouth real estate
At the lower end of Manhattan.

The attack was on World Trade and Consumer Imperialism.

The design competition will create a monument to the victims.
How about creating a world trade system that is fair to all participants?
Now that would be an enduring monument.

War is now perpetual when it used to be punctuated by peace.
America is a winner’s tragedy; freedom destroyed in a pitiful exercise to save it.

Et Tu Bruté?

There’s nothing left of Caesar except a salad and a haircut. Klipschutz

Caesar, Julius, who
Killed half the able bodied of France
To bring those reluctant frogs
Into a Roman pond

Who bridged the Rhein near Speyer
In ten short days
Without an environmental impact statement
Or German permission.

Comilitones, he intoned,
I have crossed the Rubicon.
Cut the Gordian Knot
As Alexander did.
Cut the umbilical cord
Across his mother’s belly
Up out from down under her narrow birth canal.
This is the way to the Cesarean section.

Not everybody born by the knife
Can grow up to be both
The Queen of Bithnyia
And the Emperor of Rome.

My fellow toddlers it is still
Government by assassination.
We can’t avoid the history of
The Meiji Restoration and Eisenhower’s CIA.
Brutus honey, is that you?

American presidents elected every twenty years since Lincoln
In zero years to match their accomplishments
Have either been assassinated or the attempt was made:
Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan.
Among these august dead did the living
Have even half a chance?

What if Bush the younger
Brought into office by black robes
In the year of double zeros
Would take a silver bullet
To match the silver spoon
He’s been porking out in
The public lunch box with.

If some Shakespearean character in a play would say:
“Bush should be assassinated
To meet the rhythm test of history,”
She’d be making an observation
Not a threat.

Pity and terror are the Draino of literature
According to Aristotle and Herb Ruhm.
Therefor, making war on terror is an infringement
On poet’s rights.

Bring me the chicken Caesar
Hold the haircut.

Terror is half our stuff.
What’s next,
A war on pity?

The Rocket’s Red Glare

The empire can be managed to a soft landing
Or it can be kicked apart
By the idiots who rule it and their intended victims.

The second half of the war on Iraq
Suggests the American empire will
Fight colonial wars ad infinitum
Until they exhaust themselves.

Knowing this doesn’t knock me out with happiness
But it would save protesters a lot of time
If they can agree it’s the inevitable
Fate of empires
Who imagine they’re immune to history
While merely being ignorant of it.

No Exit is the title of one book by Jean Paul Sartre, a French writer, communist and co-father of Existentialism that I’ve never been able to read, even though I have always admired the fact that he thumbed his nose at the Nobel Prize for Literature saying something like, “I don’t accept prizes, whether the Nobel or a sack of potatoes.” The Nobel Prize for Literature, as you’ve probably heard, is passed out by a pack of gunpowder academics from the net proceeds of the fortune of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, by confusing politics with literature. Each year they make some kind of difficult-to-decipher gesture toward one or another enclave in the Third World. They haven’t given one to an American for a long time—trying to snub the Empire, I suppose. Who knows what all they read on their way to spurious decisions.

To give you an example of how far into the mire language has fallen, I’m under the impression the Swedes delegated the awarding of the Peace Prize to the Norwegians, and as an old Swedish girlfriend of mine used to say, “He ain’t Norwegian” when she wanted to insult somebody, the way dweebs from Eastern Montana make fun of the hapless denizens of North Dakota. I mean, they gave the Peace Prize to the Boy Scout from Chicago and he had to pick it up the very week he announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to win the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $30,000,000,000, i.e. thirty billion dollars. I hope the unemployed are sitting down for this but my honorary degree in rocket science suggests that it is impossible to win a colonial war when it costs the Empire A MILLION dollars per soldier to put a pair of boots, as the talking heads put it, on the ground. Even if they were taking gold out of Afghanistan by the trainload, colonial war is a losing proposition. And there is nothing else there to “win” either. The last time I can remember that the Peace Prize went to such a warmonger was when the great war criminal Henry Kissinger accepted it, on behalf of the scut work he did for the scoundrel Richard Nixon in the Empire’s war on Vietnam. Americans have forgotten their own colonial history, if they ever knew it. Back in the day, early 1600s, with the importation of some good tobacco from the Orinoco River in South America, Virginia became the drug producing capital of the new world. Fortunes were made. Now the Empire has the effrontery to try to wipe out the opium producers in Afghanistan.

Colonial War in all its many disguises is one of the primary reasons why there is No Exit from the not-so-great depression. To give the Tea Party sympathizers among the audience an example they can get their red meat teeth into, the Cheney-Bush Administration started and lost three unnecessary wars simultaneously while bankrupting the Treasury and blowing a hole in the world economy that likely won’t get re-filled in the length of an ordinary lifetime. And Republicans wonder why they are out of office.

To take their undeclared wars one at a time… (By the way, this civilization declared war in 1941, two years before your author was born, and has never declared peace. We have war as a way of life, described in the political literature as “Peace and Prosperity,” going down in history as a violent parody of standards even double-talk can’t reach.) In their post 9-11 mind set in concrete, they launched the aforementioned War on Afghanistan, allegedly because the perpetrators of 9-11, mostly Saudi Arabians and Egyptians, once trained there. It was described by that half-an-asshole semi-Colon Powell as asymmetrical warfare, overlooking the fact that the asymmetry was provided by the Empire, when a handful of special ops could have taken out the survivors of the plot for chump change. At least that’s the way Eisenhower’s CIA used to do it during the “Peace and Prosperity”-driven 1950s. Discontent with starting a war they couldn’t finish much less win led them on to the War on Iraq, a regime changer if there ever was one, to depose a war criminal satrap the Empire had set up years before, one Saddam Hussein by name, who never made the slightest dent in his long war against Iran, even with the Rumsfeld-provided poison gas.

Lying their way into war is the modus operandi of the Empire, now in need of a theme. Voila! A War on Terrorism. A war on abstract nouns is the perfect setup for the Empire. The enemy can’t be found, so Osama bin Laden is still at large, generating funds for both sides. The siege mentality of the Paranoid Christian Fascists has them fighting Islamo-Fascists and the Fascists are winning. For every terrorist killed three new ones are created, an endless supply for an endless war, in an Empire presided over by endless fruitcakes. The Empire has 16 separate spy agencies, all gathering information and hoarding it from one another, much less the people on whose behalf it is purportedly gathered. If you have a secret and somebody else wants to discover it, that somebody else becomes pro forma an enemy. The interlocution of paranoia; the structure of political madness.

The algorithm for the end of empires has three integrals and derivatives. How fast the leaders burn through their assets, chief of which is the support of their populations; the size of the asset base; and the quality and focus of the opposition. Costs of empire are borne by the entire population while the benefits accrue to the very few with inside jobs: no-bid contractors who milk the sacred American cow. In other words, the calculus of empire and colonial war is an exercise in socializing the costs—socialized war, anyone?—while privatizing the benefits. This best of both worlds is a dream scheme for plutocrats and a nightmare for everybody else. An Alice in Wonderland foreign policy presided over by the presidency, no matter who holds the office, presages an epic disaster.

[Arthur editor] Jay Babcock has tempted me with the phrase, “It would be great if you wrote something on this subject,” referring to the subject line of his email, “The recession and how to live through it.”

I’ll take the bait. This is more than a recession. This is going to be a huge depression, with the “recovery” way off in the distance.

A recession, per Christopher Wood, desk chair person for The Economist in Tokyo circa 1995, is “a superabundance of inventory, and can be melted off the shelf; a depression is a superabundance of capacity” and takes much longer to get out of. Remember that it took the bean counters in Wash DC a full year to confirm the economy was in recession, and there’s a lot of over-the-counter chatter about how this recession is already longer than the one in, take your pick: 1976-1980-1991-etc. However, look around you and notice the superabundance of capacity. The industrial hind end of Europe, Japan, the US and China plus all else, can easily produce multiple times more automobiles, cell phones, TVs, computers, refrigerators, et al. than anybody with funds can buy.

This is the fourth major deflationary price collapse in the past 600 years. In the three previous price collapses, there was a long period afterward when prices did not recover their pre-fall levels for decades. Prices last collapsed hard in 1815 after Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; the period from 1815-1896 has been called by economists The Victorian Equilibrium. Many things contributed to this low-level stability, but it is sobering to realize there was scant inflation in the United States during the 19th century. (Inflation, by the by, is not necessarily a bad thing. Inflation simply moves assets around the game board from creditors to debtors; it doesn’t actually destroy anything except purchasing power if all you have is cash. In deflation, which we’re going through now, cash will buy a lot. During inflation it is better to have hard assets that increase in value at least at the same rate as cash.)

Will it take eight decades before the world economy is go-go again?

My reference to 1815 isn’t casual. I just re-read David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. His book is about the three previous big price collapses: in the early 14th century when the Black Death ended the so called “Middle” ages; then, circa 1492, when prices collapsed during the Renaissance, and we encircled ourselves globally; and the aforementioned 1815. What’s so crucial about 1815 is it is also the date and the event that Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) identifies as the moment Western culture went sideways and into “civilization,” cf. Napoleon at Waterloo. Fischer’s graphs of how the prices rose and fell, can be superimposed one over another. This collapse we’re in, the big one for the rest of our lives, started 20 years ago in Japan in 1989, has hit Argentina and most of Latin America, Russia twice now, and finally the big fish, the rest of Europe and the US. Even Doha is scaling back!

The powers that be with their printing presses will print money and throw it at the wall until enough of it sticks. Some activities will appear to return to normalcy. But you shouldn’t wait for the influx of money to turn deflation into inflation, just as you shouldn’t wait for the bailout to trickle down to you. Unemployment is going to increase and stay high for some time. Challenging moments are upon us.

My advice in hard times would be the same in good times: find something you love to do and master it, become as good as or better at it than anyone has any reason to be. Look up the people who do it really well right now. Study the masters. A musical instrument, a physical activity, painting, movies, art of all kinds, the writing of poetry or other books, whatever makes you feel better about yourself and contributes to our well being. Try enough things until you are satisfied that your fascination with the subject will lead to mastery. Six or eight hours of focused effort a day should suffice. I think this is reasonable advice, coming from an old man who has squandered most of his life by being interested in too many things to master any of them.

We don’t exist as individuals; we exist as the sum total of our relationships. You’ll need all the friends you can get, so be honest, fair and generous in your dealings with other people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or take unseemly risks. The future does not belong to the risk aversive.

It will be difficult to get rich in the onrushing hard times, but it will be easy to get poor or poorer. Watch where your money goes. Make sure you get good value for it. Avoid buying things you don’t really need. Add value to your activities by putting forth effort. Expect others to do the same.

Spend time with children and if you have children of your own, take the time to understand the world from their point of view.

Assets are things that have to be used up creating additional assets. Almost without exception, your biggest asset is your time. I could have gotten rich teaching a seminar I created called “Seize the Day,” essentially a series of sensory exercises to stimulate your imagination to take over and live your own life. But I preferred life in a small town and didn’t want to see the inside of every airport and convention center in the country.

Maybe it’s time to skip the addictions, look up old friends, or visit long-lost relatives. Life is a gift of such presurpassing value that we sometimes hardly notice. Learn to appreciate simple things, the taste of water, the odor of flowers, the great way gravity contributes to your ability to walk and run.

Some of the things people love to do and do well don’t pay that much: poetry for example. Nobody really gives much of a fuck anymore if you can understand the world and set it to music. You have to feed yourself, and if a family, contribute to their well-being. You may find yourself bearing an overload of dissonance, earning your daily bread and wishing, as the Colorado poet and painter Joe Lothamer said, “I dream of being a janitor.”

Every changed circumstance contains opportunities, which accrue to the first people to recognize them. Since circumstances are in constant flux, there is a steady stream of opportunities. Learn to spot them and make them your own.

Keep the basics in mind. People will still be buying food even if the rest of the consumer economy blows completely up, as it so richly deserves to. Heal the sick, wake the dead, feed the hungry. Food shelter and clothing. Eat slowly and chew your cud well.

grapefruit rot on the table
& it pours on the tin
propped against the barn

suddenly water
covers the road
in heavy puddles

& we are praying
& praying so
damn loud

we pray
for bigger mouths

Travis Catsull, from Year of the Girl

Other books by Catsull include Open Spirit and Isle of Asphalt from Effing Press in Austin. Catsull is the editor/founder of Haggard and Halloo and co-founder of The Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band Which won the Austin Chronicle’s choral CD of the year award in 2008 for The Golden Calves.

During the 1960s, when half of America was a race riot and an anti-war demonstration, the great musician Merle Haggard made a famous song called “Okie from Muskogee” in which he sang, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, a place where even squares can have a ball.”

Now, forty-five years later, it turns out Haggard is a pothead. From the Jan 1, 2009 New York Times:

Merle Haggard plans to give his first concerts since undergoing surgery for lung cancer two months ago, Reuters reported. In a special twist, Mr. Haggard, 71, said that for the first time in his life he would perform without having first smoked tobacco or marijuana. Notwithstanding a jab at pot smokers in his 1969 hit “Okie From Muskogee,” Mr. Haggard has long indulged a marijuana habit of his own. [He gave up a few times over the years, but “nothing was funny,” he said.] Having now put it aside, he said, he expects to work harder in 2009. The concerts are set for Friday and Saturday in his hometown, Bakersfield, Calif.

It’s okay to be a hypocrite, but I think the heads of the 1960s are owed an apology, as the Okie song was just one more stupid stanza in a drug and culture war that, guess what, we are about to win! How did marijuana get legalized? Because they don’t have 120 million jail cells vacant at any one time.

So…

The Dope from Muskogee
for Merle Haggard

If you live long enough
You’ll get to see everything
Turned inside out.

Turns out the “Okie from Muskogee”
Turned into the Pothead from Bakersfield
With no apology yet foreseen
For the damage hippy hating did to this
Defunct Vietnam War torn country.

Pot smokers take turns
Passing their joints around.
Merle must have at least one song
In his tuckerbag to extol
The virtues of Marijuana over Valium:
Please pass the music.

Put him on the train for the
Medical uses of Marijuana
Recreation without drugs
Is hardly recreation at all.